thermal printer

39 Articles

A Thermal Typewriter For Burning Thoughts

December 5, 2019 by 15 Comments

There’s a certain charm to old technologies that have been supplanted by newer versions. And we’re not just talking about aesthetic nostalgia this time. With older versions of current technology, you are still connected to the underlying process, and that’s a nice feeling.

Part of the typewriter’s charm is in its instant permanence. These days, its so easy to backspace, delete, and otherwise banish thoughts to the void without giving them a fair trial, though it’s nice not to have to pound the keys to make an impression. At the typewriter, your words are immediately committed to paper, for better or worse. You can usually see them pretty well, although maybe not on the current line, and that is good for letting the words flow without judgment.

[Murtaza Tunio] recently used a thermal POS printer in an art project, but it had since grown cold with disuse. Why not turn it into a typewriter? All it took was a Raspberry Pi, a USB keyboard, and an existing Python library for communicating with these parallel printers. Typing is a bit challenging for a few reasons. For one thing, [Murtaza] has to type five lines before the words become visible. The enter key doesn’t come across for some reason, so a different one had to be assigned. On the upside, [Murtaza] can trigger the paper cutter with a keystroke.

Not too hot on thermal printers? You might find this e-ink typewriter refreshing.

This Clapperboard Prints Movie Posters

June 10, 2019 by 3 Comments

The clapperboard is a device used in video to synchronize audio and video. Its role in movies is well known and its use goes back in one form or another to the 1920s. [Gocivici] is a big movie fan and created a clapperboard that is able to print out posters of recently announced movies when the clapper is clapped.

The poster is not a big, full color job, but rather a black and white one, roughly the size of a movie ticket. [Gocivici] keeps his movie tickets in a journal and wanted to be able to keep small posters in there along with them. A thermal printer is used to print the poster along with the title, the release date, and some information about the movie. In addition to the printer, the hardware involved is a Raspberry Pi, a switch, and an LED. The clapperboard itself is 3d printed and then painted. A bit of metal is used to keep the clappers apart and give a bit of resistance when pressing them together. A nice touch is a metal front, so you can use magnets to keep your posters on the board.

[Gocivici] has detailed build instructions up along with a video (available after the break) showing the printer in action. The 3d models are available as well as the code used to create the posters after grabbing data from TMDb. If you need your clapperboard to be as accurate as possible, take a look at this atomic clock clapperboard.

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A Cartoon-ifying Camera For Instant Absurdism

July 3, 2018 by 12 Comments

We take photographs as a way to freeze moments in time and to capture the details that get blurred by our unreliable memories. There is little room for interpretation, and this is kind of the whole point.

[Dan Macnish]’s latest project, Draw This, turns reality into absurdity. It’s a Raspberry Pi-based instant camera that trades whatever passed in front of the lens for a cartoon version of same. Draw This uses neural networks to ID the objects in the frame, and then draws upon thousands of images from Google’s Quick, Draw! dataset to provide a loose interpretation via thermal printer. Seems to us like the perfect camera to take to DEFCON (or any other part of Las Vegas).

If you have a Raspi3, a v2 camera, and a thermal printer, you can make your own crowd-sourced, cartoonified memories using the code in [Dan]’s repo. Still into recording reality? You can use Pi cameras to see in the dark or even explore a body of water.

This Robot Barfs Comics!

May 25, 2018 by 7 Comments

If there’s one thing that’s more fun than a comic, it’s a randomly generated comic. Well, perhaps that’s not true, but Reddit user [cadinb] wrote some software to generate a random comic strip and then built a robot case for it. Push a button on the robot and you’re presented with a randomly generated comic strip from the robot’s mouth.

The software that [cadinb] wrote is in Processing, an open source programming language and “sketchbook” for learning to code if you’re coming from a visual arts background. The Processing code determines how the images are cropped and placed and what kind of background they get. Each image is hand drawn by [cadinb] and has information associated with it so the code knows what the main focus of the image is. Once the panels are created, the final image is passed on to a thermal printer for printing. Everything is controlled from a Python script running on a Raspberry Pi and the code, strip artwork, and case is all available online to check out.

Now that the comic can print, a case is needed for the printer and controls. [cadinb] designed a case in Illustrator after creating a prototype out of foam core. The design was laser cut and then coloured – the main body with fabric dye and the arms stained with coffee!

Now [cadinb] has a robot that can sit on his table at conventions and a fan can press a button and have a randomly generated comic strip printed out before their eyes! We have a neat article about printing a comic on a strand of hair, and one about bringing the Banana Jr. 6000 to life!

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Polaroid Gets Thermal Printer And Raspberry Pi

April 16, 2018 by 15 Comments

Despite what you may have read in the comments, we here at Hackaday are not unaware that there’s something of a “Pi Fatigue” brewing. Similar to how “Arduino” was once a dirty word around these parts, projects that are built around the world’s most popular Linux SBC are occasionally getting dismissed as lazy. Hacker crams Raspberry Pi into an old electronic device, applies hot glue liberally, posts a gallery on Imgur, and boom! Lather, rinse, repeat.

We only mention this because the following project, despite featuring the Raspberry Pi Zero grafted into a vintage Polaroid camera, is anything but lazy. In the impeccably detailed and photographed write-up, [mitxela] explains how the Pi Zero and a thermal camera recreated the classic Polaroid experience of going from shutter button to physical picture in seconds. The workmanship and attention to detail on this build is simply phenomenal, and should quell any doubts our Dear Readers may have about Raspberry Pi projects. For now, anyway.

The video after the break will show you the modded camera in operation and goes over a few highlights of the build, but for this one you really should take the time to read the entire process start to finish. [mitxela] starts off by disassembling the Polaroid camera, complete with plenty of fantastic pictures that show how this legendary piece of consumer electronics was put together. If you’ve never seen the inside of one of these cameras, you might be surprised to see what kind of interesting hardware is lurking underneath that rather unassuming exterior. From the screw-less construction to the circuits with paper substrate, a lot of fascinating engineering went into getting this camera to a mass-market price. Frankly, the teardown alone is worth checking out.

But once the camera has been stripped down to the bare frame, the real fun begins. At the conceptual level, [mitxela] replaces the camera optics with a cheap webcam, the “brains” with a Raspberry Pi Zero, and the film mechanism with the type of thermal printer used for receipts. But how he got it all connected is why this project is so impressive. Nearly every decision made during the design and construction of this camera was for the purposes of reducing boot-time. Nobody wants a camera that takes 30, 15, or even 10 seconds to boot. It has to be available as soon as you need it.

Getting this Linux-powered camera boot up in as little as 2 seconds took a lot of clever software hacks that you’ll absolutely want to check out if you’ve ever considered building an embedded Linux device. You can’t just throw a stock Raspbian image on an SD card and hope for the best. [mitxela] used buildroot to craft a custom Linux image containing only what was needed for the camera to operate, plus a bunch of esoteric tweaks that the Junior Penguin Wrangler would likely never consider. Like shaving a full second off of the boot time by disabling dumping kernel messages to the serial port during startup.

[mitxela] brought his camera to show off at the recent Hackaday London meetup, but it was far from the first time we’ve come across his handiwork. From his servo-powered music box earlier this year to his penchant for tiny MIDI devices, he’s consistently impressed our cold robot hearts.

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I’ll Have A Beer With A Compliment Chaser

February 2, 2018 by 6 Comments

[Andrew MacPherson] found out that compliments, even insincere ones, make the recipients feel better. So, he put together a thermal printer and a hilariously large button with an Arduino and created a machine that prints compliments. And where best to put a machine that prints out compliments? The local bar, where else?

An Arduino Nano clone runs the show connected to a thermal printer. The Nano clone didn’t like the 9 volt power supply, so a buck converter was used to reduce the voltage down to 5 volts for the Nano, while the printer gets the full power. During initial trials, the printer was very slow to print and it took [Andrew] a while to adjust the parameters – after tweaking the speed as well as the heating time, he was able to get the printer working without burning the paper or taking forever to print.

Once the machine was working, it was time to add a button. A large, light-up button was connected and glued to the side of the printer. More glue was used (after some “modifications” to the printer chassis) to secure a barrel connector for the power adapter.

[Andrew] decided that since he’s down at his favorite bar quite a lot, he’d set it up there. The customers could push the button and receive a compliment while drowning their sorrows. He got a friend of his who’s a copywriter to come up with some nicely written compliments to print out. The printer was such a hit that the bartender sent [Andrew] a message on Facebook saying so. If you have a thermal printer lying around, you can use this tutorial to connect it to the internet, or, if you don’t have one, you can build your own.

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Reflective Sensor Becomes Kart Racing Lap Counter

July 15, 2017 by 8 Comments

Once you have a track and a kart to race on it, what’s missing? A lap counter that can give your lap times in hardcopy, obviously! That’s what led [the_anykey] to create the Arduino-based Lap Timer to help him and his kids trim those precious seconds off their runs, complete with thermal printer for the results.

The hardware uses an infrared break-beam sensor module (a Velleman PEM10D) to detect when a kart passes by. This module is similar to a scaled-up IR reflective object sensor; it combines an IR emitter and receiver on one end, and is pointed at a reflector placed across the track, up to 10 meters away. When a kart breaks the beam, the module reports the event to the rest of the hardware. Only needing electronics on one side allows the unit to be self-contained.

An obvious shortcoming of this system is the inability to differentiate between multiple karts, but for timing a single driver’s performance it does the trick. What’s great about this project is it showcases how accessible hardware is today; a device like this is possible to put together with what are essentially off-the-shelf components available to any hobbyist, using an Arduino as the glue to hold it together. We’d only comment that a red-tinted piece of plastic as an overlay for the red display (and a grey-tinted one for the green) would make the LED displays much easier to read. Still, this is a very clean and well-documented build. See it in action in the video embedded below.

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